First-Year Discovery Course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2007

Monday, November 26, 2007

Algorithmic composition

As we discussed in class today, for Wednesday please comment on this post with some possible data sets, and algorithms for manipulating them, that could generate some good-sounding music. Here are links to the Mozart Musikalische Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game); a general Wikipedia description; and an automated version that generates pieces for you automatically.

If you have time, also check out David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a project at University of California at Santa Cruz in which a computer is "trained" to compose in the style of any composer, from Bach to Gershwin.

3 comments:

So..When I initially considered the topic of algorithmic composition, my mind went blank. But, then I began to think about how many people can make halfway decent sounding music with little to no musical knowledge using loop based tools like ACID, or Garage Band. Now I know this wouldn't be composition in the sense of manufacturing actual phrases, but the method of choosing which loops to put where and for how long, could be approached algorithmically.

So how about if there was a loop based composing computer program with a very large library of interesting drum, and melodic loops that were giving ratings in terms of the type of music (genre, theme, feel - major or minor, etc...) These numbers would be tagged on to each loop.

There are many possible sources of data, but one that came to mind was the current mood of a human. What if, for instance, the mapping system made the computer grab major keyed clips if the video monitored person was smiling, and minor clips if they were frowning. Look up to increase speed. Right to increase volume. Wink to change keys. I know this is beginning to sound like an interactive musical game rather that a composition tool, but its what I could think of.

I think it's almost a combination of the dice game, computer based composing tools, and Steve's project.

o..What i thought was would if you used an algorithm like the one used for search engines like google, although complex in design it is simple in nature. What it does is it takes the searches and re-orders them according to how often they are clicked on.

They way you would use this is put a list of say 20 different measures or more from an instrument, then depending on the result after testing people and seeing which ones the clicked on (this test would be specifically set up) have the algorithm arrange the piece according to how it was clicked, the ones that were clicked on be played more often and the ones less clicked on be played less. The order would be generated by the algorithm. The pice could go on and on according to the algorithm.